Month: June 2011

In the abstract, the Warriors brought home a nice collection of talent and potential with their 2011 draft class. Klay Thompson has NBA scoring range, Jeremy Tyler is the type of high-risk/high-reward prospect you search for in the second round, and Charles Jenkins should round out the bench nicely as a gritty energy guy. But the Warriors don’t exist in the abstract — their decisions are inescapably viewed in the context of their reputation: too little defense, too small, too soft. They didn’t do much to shed that image with their draft picks. At least not yet.

Another year, another lottery pick, another chance for the Warriors to prove that things really are different now. Thursday’s draft — with trade rumors swirling and no clear consensus after the first two picks — should be more wide-open then most. Good front offices know how to exploit that uncertainty, leveraging whatever position they have for the greatest possible gain. To make the most of the situation takes aggressive adaptation and the connections around the NBA to work all the angles. Larry Riley has made a point in the past of stressing that he takes the opposite approach to the draft — locking in on who he wants, and letting everyone else make moves in the final 24 hours. We’ll find out Thursday night whether the additions of Lacob, West and Myers lead to more adaptive thinking. For a talent-starved Warriors team, I hope so.

Character matters. Whether you’re in business, basketball or the business of basketball, the absence of it creates a stench. With Robert Rowell’s long-overdue departure from the Golden State Warriors, the air breathed by Bay Area basketball fans smells a bit sweeter. Rowell long ago became an abbreviation for the Warriors’ futility — a punchline to a very unfunny joke — but his status as a symbol shouldn’t undermine the very real and disastrous ways he hurt the franchise we all claim as our own. The list of those who felt like they got less than a fair deal from Rowell runs long — from top talents in the NBA to die-hard fans in the top sections of the Arena. Many of his moves have been well publicized; others have not; but almost all of them held this team back from being a respectable, elite franchise. His departure, like that of his patron Cohan, was a necessary step to changing the culture and perception of this team.

The mock draft is an exercise well suited for fan-bloggers. Why settle for playing armchair GM for one team when you can wield imaginary authority for every team? Then again, the draft has become such a hit or miss exercise for the pros — particularly in a shallow year like this one — that being an amateur may not be that significant of a disadvantage. You probably have a decent argument that you would have made more of the Wolves’ endless stream of lottery picks than GM David Kahn. And early reaches like Hasheem Thabeet looked just as bad when David Stern read the name as they do with hindsight. So, in the spirit of baseless speculation and glorified guessing, here’s my first stab at the first 11 players off the board on June 23.

Since Al Attles left the bench in 1983, the Warriors have had 14 different head coaches. 12 of those coaches, logging over 1200 games, failed to lead the team to the playoffs. For me, the hiring of Mark Jackson as the Warriors’ new head coach raises one fundamental question: what separates Jackson from the 12 guys that tried and failed to right this ship before him? “No coaching experience whatsoever” is not a reassuring distinction.